Category Archives for Medicine

Last week, a wave of strep throat hit my family. Four out of the five of us came down with it. The exception – of course – was my oldest son, who seriously never gets sick. I very well might literally kill someone to get his immune system. But anyway…

I caught my symptoms early, after my three year old daughter had already had a positive strep test. So rather than wait, I hit the doc ASAP and got some antibiotics. And then a funny thing happened: my cold-like symptoms actually got worse.

My first thought was that I had a secondary infection. It’s not uncommon to pick up a cold or some other virus at the same time as strep, when the immune system is already weakened. However, I noticed something a little odd. It didn’t really feel like a cold. It felt more like allergies. So I tried taking my allergy medication, which worked extremely well this spring in peak pollen season. Didn’t help at all. So… I skipped a couple of doses of my amoxicillin – an n = 1 experiment, if you will.

And my symptoms cleared up. Then, this morning, I started taking it again. Symptoms are coming back already. A bit of Googling reveals the following:

Respiratory changes may also develop as a sign of an allergy to amoxicillin. For example, you may notice difficulty breathing in relation to this type of allergy or develop a cough that is not related to a cold or the flu. You may become hoarse or develop nasal congestion. Sneezing may even develop as a sign of an amoxicillin allergy.

The latter part of this is more or less exactly what I’m going through. Other than the nasal congestion, I feel perfectly fine.

The interesting thing is, I think I’ve had this allergy my whole life and simply not known it. Most of the time when I taken antibiotics I’ve already had some kind of sinus congestion – strep throat, a sinus infection, etc – so it never stood out. But I was always – always – the one in my family who took the longest to recover from sinus infections. And now I think I know why. I think I had recovered from the infection just fine – but the antibiotics themselves were causing me to continue having symptoms.

It’s not a major allergy. I’ve only got a day and a half left on this prescription, so I’m going to go ahead and finish it out. But next time, I’m going to request something different.